Who doesn't love a good bowl of pasta. It's the very reason why Italian restaurants are the most popular in the country.
Want to bring a fancy and expensive Italian restaurant directly to your own kitchen?
Sure you do, and it's really not that difficult. Cooking pasta isn't that difficult, most people just make a few simple mistakes when cooking pasta. If they would just make some small changes to how they cook it, their pasta would be elevated to the likes of Mario Batali.
Champions of Italian cuisine -- Batali included -- love to talk about these techniques because so many people just make pasta the wrong way. And, by wrong all I really mean is not they way its typically made in Italy. Since the Italians created it, I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing.
Here are the five biggest tips you can use to make your pasta just as good as they do in fancy Italian restaurants.
Tip 1: Pasta water should taste like the ocean.
The first step is to cook the pasta in properly salted water. Add 1 ½ to 2 Tbsp of salt to your pot of water. A good rule to remember is that pasta water should taste like the ocean. The salt will season the pasta as it cooks, giving it good flavor that you can't add through a sauce. Since salt changes the boiling temperature of water, it is important to add the salt after the water comes up to a boil.
Tip 2: Al dente means "to the tooth"
Cook the pasta 2 minutes short of the time written on the package. Remember, pasta is supposed to have some texture. There is supposed to be a bite to it. Read the back of the package and set your timer two minutes less. Don't worry, you'll cook the pasta more in the sauce later, see step 4.
Tip 3: Save the pasta water.
When you drain your pasta make sure you save at least 1 cup of the pasta water. The starches from the pasta get released into the boiling water, and you have this great liquid that is already seasoned. By pouring it down the drain you're just wasting it. Adding some water to a sauce that is too tight will loosen up the sauce, while at the same time the starch in the water will allow it to cling to the pasta better.
Step 4: Finish cooking the pasta with the sauce in a pan
That classic Olive Garden image -- of sauce poured on top of a bed of spaghetti -- is the wrong way to make a serving of pasta. The biggest secret of restaurants is finishing the pasta with its sauce in a sauté pan. This allows the flavors of the sauce to get incorporated into the pasta. Cooking the sauce and the pasta together for a couple of minutes allows the sauce to really dress the pasta. Heat the sauce in the pan first, then add the pasta and cook. Toss the pasta and sauce together. Add a little water if you need to loosen the sauce up a bit.
Step 5: Sauce is a dressing for the pasta, pasta is not a vehicle for sauce
Pasta, cooked al dente, has amazing flavor and texture. This is what made pasta so popular in the first place. Some where down the line, people got sauce crazy. I can understand this, sauce is delicious and easy to indulge in. But Italian cuisine is all an act of balance. Too much sauce is simply too much. Think of a bowl of pasta like a bowl of salad. You want the sauce to cling to it, to dress it. Just as you don't want a salad with a puddle of dressing, a bowl of pasta should not be drowning in its sauce.
Depending on how you grew up eating pasta, these rules might seem like completely outrageous. But, give it a try and you'll see that you can make restaurant style pasta from your kitchen.
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